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True a table saw would not work for a tree branch, but I would prefer digging up a gas pipeline with backhoe rather than just a shovel. If I was cutting a tree branch I would prefer a saw to an axe, and for a very thick branch a chain saw.

I’ve worked in technology for twenty years, the past thirteen as a product manager. I’ve gained somewhat of a reputation for being effective at working with software engineers.... For years I’ve kept my secrets close to the vest. But no longer: today I will share with you my Ten-Step Plan for Working With Engineers. Or more to the point: how to make engineers do what you tell them to do.

Sure, every game has an ending of sorts. For a certain class of classic game, though, that ending was always of the "You Are Dead Ha Ha Ha!" variety. From Robotron 2084's ever-increasing robot hordes to Missile Command's memorable "THE END" explosion, you went into these games knowing that failure was not just an option, but really the only option. Then there are the games that seem like they should go on forever but, for one reason or another, just don't. Whether it's because of a coding error leading to an unintentional "kill screen" or a simple design choice stopping an otherwise never-ending series of loops, a lot of games that seem unbeatable at first glance can actually be conquered in one way or another.

Thanks to these programming glitches, it's exception-ally hard to win.

I want to know how to beat this, which is a sort of mega-mini-game you'd get when you plugged one of the other Sonic games into the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge (I think there may have been other steps involved).

Basically, you navigate non-stop around a checkerboard that is wrapped around a sphere world. There are a bunch of blue dots you visit, which turns them red. You must turn each blue dot red to pass that stage. If you hit a red dot, you lose. The star dots bounce you around.

Each stage seemed to be procedurally generated, and I played hundreds of them before giving up.

Microsoft is no stranger to the concept of wrist-based computing, having worked with watchmakers to release a line of smartwatches starting nearly a decade ago. Ultimately, they didn’t catch on, and the watches were discontinued. Now, a new report from the Wall Street Journal says the company is thinking about getting into the market again, with a touch-based smartwatch of its own. The report comes amid rumors that Apple, Google and others are moving in this direction with plans for smartwatches themselves.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day... except when it's digital.

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so.... But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.... These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.

In today’s installment of FlippedBITS, I want to examine a handful of common misconceptions about IMAP, a common protocol for retrieving email from a server. IMAP stands for… well, thereby hangs the first tale. IMAP’s inventor, Mark Crispin (who, sadly, died in December 2012), called the first version of his creation Interim Mail Access Protocol. Versions 2, 3, and 2bis were referred to as Interactive Mail Access Protocol, and version 4 — what’s in use today — is officially Internet Message Access Protocol. Although many Web sites claim that the acronym once stood for Internet Mail Access Protocol, I have found no credible references to back up that claim.

So someone shoulder-taps you and asks you to explain the concepts behind JavaScript Inheritance to them. In my eyes you’ve got a few options.... Sometimes these analogies get pretty crazy in my head, and I start to think that maybe instead of trying to apply known examples in the outside world in order to help people understand, it’s often better to just let someone know why they might wanna use inheritance in their programs!

I've been doing this programming thing for a long time now (8 professional years), and during that time I have accumulated a lot opinions (some are right, some are probably wrong). In this phase of my career I am looking at what programming constructs can I use to make my life easier. One thing that sticks out to me as a sore point is the keyword void.... To state it simply, void is useful when I want to perform an action on an object and don't expect a result returned. In theory it sounds great, but if I don't expect a single result back, I am most likely going to want to inspect the object itself, or perform another action on the object.

It depends. Based on the example provided, it makes sense to apply Fluent Interface and to avoid void. However there are numerous cases which don't need an instance to be returned. And hence a void method is not a bad idea.

After a delay, the software development kit (SDK) for the Pebble smartwatch is now live. On Friday, the watch maker publicly released the SDK and documentation, which was originally scheduled for when the watches started shipping. This means that owners of the Pebble watch — one of the hottest KickStarter projects in 2012 with more than 68,000 backers — can soon look forward to applications for their timepiece.... For now, the SDK appears to support custom watch faces but will be expanded for functional applications.

Once upon a time, we maybe started out with Logo to understand simple command sequencing, or BASIC – both, you’ll note, frequently provided with interpreters or REPL-type environments which are great to learn in. For a while, PASCAL was a popular learning language on University courses – in fact, it was designed by Niklaus Wirth precisely to help educate people about the whacky ‘new’ ideas that we should organize our programs in structured blocks, with subroutines, and loops and things.

It’s important to note it’s of utmost importance that when we capture Important Business Logic, we do so with gravitas and sincerity; this means doing so in a language that the business owners and customer representatives (and most of the marketing department) can understand. So, it’s with a grave and sincere demeanor that I present to you an important language in your .NET programming toolbox: LOLCODE.

Why aren’t there more high quality mobile web apps that have the look, feel, and performance of their native counterparts? I don’t think the reason is a technical one. Granted, some apps must be native: OpenGL-based games, for example, or apps that access hardware capabilities that are not yet exposed to the browser (a shrinking list); but I don’t buy the argument that native SDKs allow you to create interfaces that are inherently better, smoother, more dynamic — or more delightful — than what is possible via HTML5.

Some lessons we’ve learned about making web apps work well on mobile devices.

The web platform has advanced out of all recognition, and continues to evolve at a frankly bewildering pace (I’m paid to keep track of all this stuff, and if I take a fortnight’s holiday I scramble to get back on top of it). Four years ago, if you wanted to access your device’s GPS information, you pretty much had to use a native app; now, the W3C Geolocation API is available in all browsers, on most classes of devices. The advancement of what the press likes to call “HTML5″ (but mostly isn’t just HTML5) is closing the gap between the capabilities of native and web. But it isn’t there yet.

You can do a lot with web technology. What more would you like it to do?

Unicode is supported everywhere, but font support for Unicode characters is sparse. When you use any slightly uncommon character, you have no guarantee someone else will be able to see it.... So what characters can you count on nearly everyone being able to see? To answer this question, I looked at the characters in the intersection of several common fonts: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, and Droid Sans. My thought was that this would make a very conservative set of characters.

Have a plan to steal millions from banks and their customers but can't write a line of code? Want to get rich quick off advertising click fraud but "quick" doesn't include time to learn how to do it? No problem. Everything you need to start a life of cybercrime is just a few clicks (and many more dollars) away.

Back in the fall of 1994, Bill Clinton was nearly midway through his first term, Ace of Base was at the top of the charts, and the Web was in its infancy. Businesses were just waking up to the power of the Internet as a commercial platform. In California, the staff at Hotwired — the Internet offshoot of Wired — contemplated how exactly to pay the writers it hired. The idea arrived to create a dozen sections that would carry “banner” advertising. This wasn’t entirely original. Early Web service Prodigy had used similar methods, although it placed its banners at the bottom of the screen. (This led to the first ad blocker; a piece of plastic affixed to the bottom of monitors to obscure the dreaded advertising.)

To be a good coder in Silicon Valley is to be among the pampered elite. You get fat paychecks, people bring you free gourmet food, drivers shuttle you around town. Coders here are really treated much like talented entertainers would be down south in Hollywood. It’s a thought not lost on Altay Guvench, a coder himself who has become one of the first agents for software developers. Don’t groan. It was only a matter of time.

Never work with children or animals, and make sure you get a piece of the merchandising.

What's in a string? That depends on who you ask, apparently; a lesson that Fedora recently learned when it unexpectedly ran into a problem with the release name for the upcoming Fedora 19, "Schrödinger's Cat"—and all of the unusual characters contained within. Typographic oddities might seem like a trivial reason to upend the distribution release process, but a validation tool in the bug reporting system objected to the name, so Fedora developers found themselves asking whether it was more practical to stop and fix all of the utilities, or to change the release name itself.

Ha! We are in 2013 now, and Linux still can't handle that? More than a decade ago, I tried to backup some files with non-pure ASCII characters from a Linux file system to a CD - and the names were broken. Well, somewhere on the web I found the information that it was not a bug, just a difference in the character sets of the file systems... Oh great! And now, more than a decadce later, Linux does still händle poor ASCII characters only.